It’s that time of year again, that it is the end of my Art Show Season this weekend. If you are in the Carroll County, Md area, but sure to stop by the Carroll Farmers Market in Westminster at the Ag Center this Saturday from 8 am to 2 pm.
Since it is the last show of the year, it is also a customer appreciation day, and I will be giving up to 25% of my prints. So if there was something that you liked during the year, but didn’t get it, this weekend will be your best deal of the year.
The home by the stream
Abandoned A-Frame home and broken footbridge
Not totally sure that no one lives in this home anymore, but I’ve always loved the look of it by the stream. Even though the footbridge is no longer usable, I think it still ads character to the scene
On the way to a camera club meeting this week I passed an old mill that I drive by all the time and I’ve been meaning to get a picture of. As I passed, I realized I was going to be early so I turned around and parked the car and set out to get my picture of this old mill.
I mention this as further down the road was an older home that again, I have driven by for years and always thought to myself, I need to stop and get a picture of that. I have no idea when this house was built, but it obviously was one of the earlier homes built in the area. It had a large overhanging roof porch that looked like it went all the way around the sides and front of the house. It would have made a great picture.
I say would as when I drove by after getting my pictures of the old mill I was sad to see that it had been knocked down and removed from the property.
It just reminded me, if there are older structures you have been wanting to get a picture of, get it now, don’t wait and say I’ll get that someday as when that someday comes, it might not be there.
Here is one of the photos of the mill that I was able to get that evening.
Carrollton Roller Mill
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Get it at the launch pricing for a limited time of $59 for new customers and $49 for existing Macphun customers. That’s a $10 savings off of the retail prices
So give it a try as I’m sure you will realize this is the best photo editor for the Mac for beginner to Advanced users.
Once you download and install Luminar, you will get access to a series of 26 videos showing you how to make the most of Luminar’s features and options.
Here is my first photo edited with Luminar and one of the first I took with my Fujifilm X-T2
Sometimes things don’t always go as planned, but that doesn’t mean the pictures you end up with are not worth keeping.
Recently I went out on two different days with hope to take some breathtaking sunset photography.
On the first trip, I just wanted to get the sunset on a recently cut farmers field. This turned out to be a dud as far as my plans went. First, the sunset did not look like it was going to be that great so I didn’t head out to the location. About 10 mins after I had planned on leaving, the sun broke through the clouds and the start of a spectacular sunset was on its way.
I got into the car and rush to the location I was thinking about. Even though it was only a few miles from where I was, by the time I got there and got my camera equipment setup, the best part of the sunset had gone. I was bummed, but I was still determined to get some photos while I was there so it would not be a wasted trip.
I looked around and saw that the farmer’s combine was parked nearby and that the cab’s window was facing in the direction of what was left of the sunset. I immediately ran over and set up my tripod and started taking pictures. I usually try to do HDR photo’s which require taking a series of shots at different exposures which get combined later on my computer with Aurora HDR Pro to produce the final picture.
Here is one of the pictures I ended up capturing. It was not the red sky and the farm field that I had planned on, but I made the best of what was available to me.
Sunset Reflection in the cab of a combine after a long day on the job.
This shot was a result of the HDR process by combining the 3 shots shot at -2,0,+2 exposures and using Aurora HDR Pro to process the combined shots into the final you see above.
Now on to another trip where my HDR Process failed me
The weekend storm is now the largest single snowfall event on record for the Baltimore area. The only time we have had it worse was the back to back snow storms in 2010. What made it worse was that it was one right after the other, but still not the amount of snow we received this time.. Like many around us, I spent yesterday digging out for 6+ hours just to get my 100 feet of driveway clear and unbury the cars. We got lucky in that a neighbor’s son who had a plow on his truck cleared our spur of the road and another neighbor had already cleared the main private road out to the county road.
Thank goodness I bought a snow blower a few years back or I think I would still be out there and very sore instead of just a little sore and stiff. I’m still recovering from all the exercise today though with sore muscle that haven’t seen that much use in a while. Despite all the work it takes to clear it, it was a beautiful sight to see everything covered in snow there for a while.
The beauty of the snow
The scene outside out house before we got to clearing the road. Yes our road is buried in there between the stake and the pine trees. Now that things are cleared and all the snow is piled up it doesn’t look so pretty.
I was hoping to get another series of photos with the snow on the trees, but by the time we got things cleared out enough the snow had fallen off the trees. It was just way to deep for me to walk in before so I wasn’t able to get the entire tree line as I’ve done in the past like I had hoped to. Also, the snow was only on the south side of the trees this time. During the storm the high winds from the north kept the snow from sticking to the north side of the trees.
A tip when taking pictures of snow
I learned over time from various web sources that when you are photographing snow you should slightly overexpose your photo. The thinking behind it make sense to me in that all the snow glare is making your sensor think it is much brighter than it actually is and thus it is setting your f-stop higher that you want it to be, an Aperture of f11 instead of f8 for example. Since the f-stop is higher it is letting is less light and as a result you will get dull looking snow instead of the crisp white snow that you see. For the above picture I over exposed my photo by 1 f-stop. It is straight out of the camera untouched.
Here is a photo I took back during the 2010 storm before I figured out this tip. And you can see how dull it looks. Granted it was cloudy in this picture but it was still very bright outside at the time.
